Thursday, August 08, 2013

I can show you the world

Hello there, buddies.If you didn't sing that to the song from Aladdin we can no longer be friends....I am kidding....Much love.

I am not sure of the direction that this post is taking....this literally could go anywhere. It could turn in to one of my typical rants, a random post telling you of my failed attempts at doing maths, or we could really go off on a tangent and start talking about purple flying pigs with unicorn horns....I don't know.Well you all know how much I am dying to do some travelling after my 3 years at university. With my little bunch of friends, we planned out an entire list of about 200 places we wanted to visit. We got all excited and whatnot for it when we realised the only way that it would be possible in anything less than 50 years would be if we all won the lottery. Which deeply saddens me as it won't happen. So we brainstormed a few other ideas. Travelling is something the 5 of us are all seriously wanting to do as none of us took a gap year between sixthWe then went on to plan a 2 week holiday (vacation) to Florida to stay in Disney World as we thought it would be considerably cheaper and more affordable. So we figured it all out and we would all be able to afford it by July 2015. So we got planning and got our dates settled, a quote for a rough price and we got saving. I even made a chart with over 2000 squares on that I could colour in for every pound I saved. Now, the only way we would afford to go to Florida was with Thomas Cook as they are considerably cheaper than the likes of Virgin. When I fly to Florida with my family we go with Thomas Cook - we used to go with Virgin Atlantic but it is far more expensive now. Thomas Cook have since decided that they are no longer flying out of Gatwick airport to go to Florida and the only places they are now going from is Manchester and Glasgow. This I found really fucking irritating due to the fact that most of us live within a close proximity of London (I can be in London in just over 1 hour 15 minutes) so it would be cheap for us to get there. Since Thomas Cook have decided to stop flying from there, our prices would have sky-rocketed another couple of hundreds of pounds to get to the other airports to fly out. Long story short, we have abandoned those plans.We then re-evaluated and thought that we might be able to do a bit of backpacking and travelling around Australia. Now I can imagine that you are raising your eyebrows at me as Australia is considerably more expensive than Florida. Well shockingly, you are wrong. We did the maths and travelling around Australia for 6 weeks was a bit cheaper than going to Florida for 2 weeks. So we got planning for that also. Now this was a solid plan up until about 5 days ago when we sat down and had a serious chat. We decided that whilst travelling
around Australia was affordable, it was not realistic for a bunch of recent
graduates with 3 years worth of debt behind them. It turns out we would need
about 6 months to do all the stuff we wanted to do. We thought that we could
narrow down our list of places we wanted to visit and cut out some of the
experiences so that we could do it in two months, but it just wasn't happening
as there is so much to do. Basically we have had to completely scrap that idea,
too.

Several different conversations
followed this shitty realisation. We considered buying an old truck/van/camper
van and go on a road trip through America. This turned out too expensive.

Then we thought about literally
slumming-it throughanywhereabroad including Thailand,
Australia and China, but we thought that it might be too dangerous. This is all turning out to be a bit of a bit let down, really. I am still genuinely considering giving up on the idea that I will go travelling until literally I am 50. You may think this is an exaggeration, but believe me, it is not. Especially since I struggled to even get a job this summer, which I am starting like two months late so I will get only four weeks worth of work - and it is casual hours so I might not even get any - despite this, I am extremely grateful for this job as it might have just saved my ass a little bit (a lot). But I am having to start to reign in my exceedingly high expectations of travelling *sob sob*.

So after it all got a bit doom and gloom, we then thought of something a
little closer to home....why don't we look in to travelling around parts of
Europe? So after some extensive research, we came across the fact that we can get a rail pass for some funky train that goes round the whole of Europe - how awesome?! Turns out it is only like £350 ish for a months unlimited pass, which is pretty cheap. So I made a list of all the countries and cities we want to visit and sort of complied them into a route (which is really awful, by the way...). I have since found a website that does it for me...but it keeps fucking up which is irritating me. So now we are doing a bit of maths (gah) to figure out how much money will have to be saved to travel. Hopefully it won't be too much as my loan is just getting smaller and smaller :( So you never know, you could be reading all about my awesome travels in a couple of years. So all keep your fingers crossed for me. Damn you, government, for lying about tuition fees. Fuckers.

On a slight side note, yet still weirdly related to this post, have you heard that Tom Daley and his friend Sophie are travelling the world with ITV for what I am guessing is free......?!!?! So apparently you now have to be a medal holding Olympic diver to travel the world. I am slightly annoyed at this to be perfectly honest. Sorry, Tom, you know I love you really. It takes normal people like me years to save for travelling, but some people get handed it. Seriously, ITV, you could have had an awesome bunch of desperate students travelling where you would get proper stuff from. Gah. Rage. I think ITV should pay me and my friends to travel the world. That would be nice.

Hey, Richard Branson, if we traveled by Virgin planes the whole time would you sponsor us to travel and do a documentary on it? Plus crazy promos on my blog? I wonder if he ever would read this. No. No he would not. Was worth a shot though.I do think that there aren't many options available for students to go travelling after uni. Yes, there are various gap year companies which offer these opportunities, but they seem to be aimed towards people who have had the chance to earn a fair amount of money as I think that they are still slightly expensive...that might just be me, though. I'd like to see more graduate travelling opportunities. I mean, we have spent 3 or so years studying our asses off to get a degree, so I would like a bit of a break to get some experiences under my belt, you know? I have a feeling that I am going to get a lot of negative comments on this about my money situation/people telling me to get a job. So before you post something like that read this: I applied to over 60 places for a job. I had 3 replies from them. One company, which I shall not name, turned me down after an interview as I was a student. This is so unfair!!! I will be spending my first few days back down in Plymouth looking for a job for the next two years, so if you know of any then let me know. Getting a job is hard; there aren't many of them about. So please do not tell me I am not doing enough because that is bullshit and I do not take kindly to those comments.What are your thoughts on the options available for students to go travelling after graduation?

Anyways, I think I should stop writing because no one wants to read my annoying thing about the poor student who has no money.

There are plenty more posts like this in the pipeline, and some awesome original work from yours truly, so click "Join This Site" to see them before anyone else gets to!

I am also starting to take suggestions for things you would like to hear me rant about, so chuck them my way by any way you want and I will rant and rave about them!